Major exchanges like NYSE, Nasdaq and Coinbase are betting on tokenized stocks, but tokenization is built on blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. That is one of two ways to get exposure, says Virtune — the other is investing in the issuers.
Photo: Christopher Kock (below) and Andreas Severin (top right), interviewed by Morten Myrstad (top left).
Tokenization isn't new — the first proof that it works was stablecoins, a tokenized dollar, which has existed since Tether launched USDT. But according to Christopher Kock, co-founder and CEO of the Stockholm-based crypto asset manager Virtune, two things have changed now: regulation is falling into place globally to support the growth, and traditional financial players are participating at a growing rate — something many in the crypto market have long waited for. Kock and Andreas Severin, Virtune's Chief Sales Officer, were interviewed by Kaupr's Morten Myrstad during the event "How to invest in the tokenization trends" on 7 October.
The London Stock Exchange has, according to Severin, announced plans to offer tokenized stock trading through the platform xStocks. Coinbase launched its own offering of tokenized stocks this summer, built on Base, a layer-2 solution on Ethereum. The New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and several German crypto exchanges are also working on tokenization, in several cases through private blockchains rather than public ones like Ethereum or Solana. Adoption, according to Kock and Severin, is largely coming from the core of traditional finance — exchanges like Nasdaq and NYSE, banks like JPMorgan, and asset managers like BlackRock — not from crypto-native players.
Kock points to Chainlink as a key provider in this infrastructure. The company's oracle services pull price data from traditional markets onto the blockchain in real time, so that a tokenized stock can be priced in line with the underlying stock, while its CCIP service is used to move tokenized assets between different blockchains. Even banks building their own closed blockchains, such as JPMorgan, will, according to Kock, still need this kind of service.
The same logic applies to stablecoins, Kock points out. A stablecoin market growing toward $2 trillion doesn't automatically lift the whole crypto market — that, he says, is the most common misconception Virtune encounters when educating investors. Buying Circle means buying a stablecoin issuer, while buying ether means buying the actual infrastructure that makes stablecoins and tokenization possible.
"The stablecoins are the traffic, and the fuel for this traffic will be, for example, Ethereum's own token, ether," Kock says.
According to Severin, Ethereum has so far taken the lead in tokenization, with close to 50 percent of allocations to tokenized fund shares, stocks, bonds and stablecoins — driven by the blockchain's longer track record and higher degree of reliability among traditional financial players. Solana is growing faster in terms of number of investors, and according to Severin overtook Ethereum on that measure in the spring of 2026, but in a different niche: low transaction costs and high speed make the chain most attractive to payment companies like Visa and PayPal. Chainlink wins regardless of how tokenization ends up split between private and public blockchains, Severin argues, because its oracle service for price data and its CCIP service for moving assets between chains are used by players on both sides.
Severin draws a clear distinction between Bitcoin and the other crypto assets mentioned in the context of tokenization.
"We see Bitcoin as a diversifier, a safe haven, a future store of value against inflation and global uncertainty, whilst Ethereum, Solana and Chainlink are much more investments into the future financial system," Severin says.
One unresolved question is what an investor actually gets when a stock is tokenized. Kock points to Robinhood, which has faced criticism because investors in its tokenized stocks don't get voting rights, unlike ordinary shareholders. Regulation of tokenized stocks also varies between providers such as xStocks, Dinary and Ondo: some are categorized as transferable securities, some are physically backed by the underlying stock, others are synthetic products.
While the development is gathering pace internationally, Kock and Severin describe the Nordics as lagging behind. Severin points to a K33 report showing that around 13 percent of Swedes have some form of crypto exposure, and argues that the Nordics therefore aren't systematically behind on the retail side. On the institutional side — among advisers, family offices and banks — he instead describes the Nordics as well behind countries like Switzerland. He points to the Swedish fund industry's historical fee structure, where advisers have received kickbacks from fund providers, as a contributing explanation. After MiFID II required advisers to bill clients directly for their services, he argues that regulated, cost-effective products have become more competitive.
Both MiCA in the EU/EEA and the Genius Act, the US stablecoin law passed last year, have, according to Kock and Severin, been a precondition for the institutional interest they're now seeing, partly because the rules impose requirements on custody services and on how issuers of tokenized assets must secure the underlying holdings. The Genius Act requires, among other things, that stablecoin issuers always hold full backing for the tokens they issue.
Severin believes the remaining risk in the market is mainly structural and tied to crypto exchanges, rather than to the blockchain infrastructure itself. While players like Coinbase are MiCA-licensed, unregulated exchanges still exist where a new crisis, along the lines of the FTX collapse, could, in his view, hit the market hard in the short term.
The conversation with Kock and Severin took place in connection with Kaupr and Virtune's joint event "How to invest in the tokenization trends" on 7 October. The full recording is available here.
Sources: Virtune and Kaupr
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